Seymour Hersh as quoted in this week's Austin Chronicle (interesting what he says about Obama's speech before AIPAC, the first speech BO gave after getting the nomination):

"Hersh: 'We're in Real Trouble'

But the combination highlight and lowlight was a talk by legendary reporter Seymour Hersh, who made his journalistic bones nearly 40 years ago when he broke the story of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam and more recently reported in exhausting detail the lacerating scandal of the U.S. military torture project at Abu Ghraib (Chain of Command). Hersh, now 71, is remarkably easygoing for a man who devotes himself to the darkest aspects of international political reporting. But he was in a somber mood at Friday's lunch, not only about U.S. affairs in Iraq and Iran but about what he described as the "nightmare" of Barack Obama's obsequious, saber-rattling speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in the wake of his clinching the presidential nomination. "He didn't need to do that," said Hersh. "He may have thought he needed to do that, but it just wasn't necessary."

Yet Hersh described himself as an Obama supporter – "Let's get him elected, then we can start to kick him around" – much of that conviction due to his overall judgment of the Bush administration: "We've never had a government this corrupt." Pursuing his reporting on Iraq, Hersh has been more concerned of late about possible U.S. attacks on Iran, which he sees as still likely in the coming year. Bush "is the most radical president we have ever had," Hersh said, "and what's more, he's completely uneducable." He said his sources are telling him that there is resistance from U.S. military officials to an attack on Iran, but he is increasingly convinced that "Bush is not going to leave office without doing something about Iran. ... I don't think there is much we can do to stop him." On the Iraq war itself, Hersh described Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus as "basically undertakers: They're in charge of keeping the face of the corpse rouged and the body from smelling until after November."

There was considerably more in this vein, reminiscent of Antonio Gramsci's legendary political motto, "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." Since Hersh was speaking to a convocation of reporters, he counseled doggedness and relentlessness, recalling how even amidst a stoutly conservative regime at The New York Times, he had been able to break stories that revealed the truth about Vietnam and to undermine the officially institutionalized heroic "image we had of war."

Hersh bluntly described our moment and predicament as "the lowest point in American history," and it's hard to argue with him. Afterward, I found myself wondering if those 18th century colonial statesmen devotedly honored in the Philly landmarks would remotely recognize the imperial behemoth that has largely usurped the tiny republic of free states they had risked their lives to establish so many years ago. Men and women like ourselves: All they could ask us is to do what we can, in our own 21st century ways, to bring the latest empire to an end."

My comment:
By the way, IMHO, I find Madsen to be largely credible, if not infallible...and I find it entirely plausible that Bush & Cheney have tried over the last few years to set in motion an attack on Iran only to have those attempts thwarted by people within the system who have caught on to their methods, post-9/11. The Minot/Barksdale nuke episode might be one example of that phenomenon.

9/11 Truth ends the 9/11 Wars